I love this picture. I took it of a flower that came with many other flowers that I bought April (she deserved it, she puts up with me all the time!). This flower was very small, perhaps the size of the last two joints of your pinky finger. It has no real powers, no real abilities. You can't eat it (at least I don't think you can eat it), and it won't change your life. But it is beautiful. Isn't it strange that it is, at least in part, the perfect inability of flowers that make them so beautiful? Small and practically useless, this wonderful little photo of this flower that probably died a few days later still reminds me that there is beauty in the world.

This all comes to me because I am reading a book now that is about the deification of man. How great, how powerful, all we can achieve, all that we can do! Focusing on this group of people who are ultra powerful, ultra competitive and wanting to move the world. The futility of their mindsets and their actions is sad to me. The author so badly wants to make them out to be heroes, but they are so sad and small and lost that she can't do it. All of the accomplishments of man come to nothing. Isaiah 40:22-23 says:

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.

Interesting! So what of the people who are living like their accomplishments are the center of this whole thing? This book glorifies them for all they have done, worships them as the ones who are greater than the others, yet to the Lord, that's nothing. Their glory, and their money and their power will all dry up and blow away. I am just so thankful to be reminded by this truth by this sad author's foolishness that I am small. Though I swim in a sea of hundreds of millions of stars on a ball of mud that flies through space with utter disregard to my will in the matter, and though I cannot control the weather, nor the economy, nor the politics of this world, I am valuable. I am a small cove of beauty that the creator made and placed (for the time) in Denver Colorado, and one day he will come and collect this flower and take it to a place where it will forever bloom for His glory and goodness, and nothing else will matter.